It worked pretty well for many applications. Machine translations are almost on par with human translations. This is a multi-billion dollar industry.
AI is slightly behond search engines/internet in terms of usefulness, and even that was bubble, and the sad thing is we already had a few AI wonters before simply due to the cost of research, if they end up losing money, or worse we end uo in a recession because of AI hype, research and funding are gonna dry up ridiculously fast, which wouod hurt not only AI but most of the tech industry short term.
Well at least the us has recovered enough to absorb that fall, i hope.